CA insurance chief asks feds to lift gay and bi blood ban
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara and four major LGBTQ civil rights advocacy groups in the state have joined together to urge the United States Food and Drug Administration to end decades of restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood.
Lara, who in 2018 became the first openly gay person elected to statewide office in California history, penned a letter January 24 to Xavier Becerra, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (and Lara's former colleague as a statewide elected official, as Becerra was state attorney general before he was appointed to lead HHS by President Joe Biden), and Dr.
Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the federal Food and Drug Administration. "This is outdated, discriminatory guidance based in prejudice — not in public health — and it is contributing to our current national blood donation crisis," Lara, a Democrat who is up for reelection this year, stated in his letter. "I respectfully urge you to permanently lift the entire deferral period in order for a male donor who has had sex with another man from donating blood." As the Bay Area Reporter reported last week, in 1983 due to the AIDS epidemic, the FDA imposed a lifetime ban on blood donations by men who'd had sex with men since 1977.
Under the Obama administration this was changed to a ban on men who'd had sex with a man in the past 12 months; and under the Trump administration amid a blood shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this period was reduced to three months.
